Online Information and Referral Services to Reduce Phone Calls

Acronym of the case:

ONLINE-I&R

Web address of the case:

http://www.greenwichlibrary.org/commanswers.h...

Country of the case:

North America

City/region:

Greenwich, Connecticut

Posting Date:

19 January 2010

Last Edited Date:

25 January 2010

Author:

Josep Lluis de la Rosa (University of Girona)

citizen | information | services

Type of initiative

Other

Case Abstract

Public Authorities have increasing difficulties in providing timely and accurate information in response to the wide variety of citizens' enquiries to which they are expected to respond. These often require the citizen to be redirected to elsewhere as the query refers to areas of responsibility of other Authorities. This often leads to frustration and wasted time for the citizen, who has to repeatedly explain his query, before obtaining a satisfactory answer. The Information and Referral Services (I&R) are created to help the citizen. This case demonstrates how online I&R can help to reduce the administrative burdens while improving the overall quality of service provided, increasing its availability to full 24/7, and significantly reducing the overall cost to the administration. It is shown the case of Community Answers, in Greenwich, Massachusetts, USA, where the online approach has helped to reduce by a third the required to man telephones while the number of calls increased by 25% between 2000 and 2008.That case is compared with our own experiences with the Call Centre of the city of Terrassa, Catalonia, Europe, where the service with the on-line I&R has attended a third more questions in the years 2007 and 2008 compared to 2006 without additional costs and similar satisfaction as a result of the adoption of the results of the iSAC6+ European project for the deployment of open source I&R on-line platforms

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

Sector

Local/Regional Community Development | Other Social Services

Date

January to April 2009

Date operational

December 2009

Target Users

Administrative | Citizen

Target Users Description

Citizen Information Services, Sistemes d'AtenciÃ³ Ciutadana, Information and Referral Services

Scope

Local (city or municipality)

Status

Research

Language(s)

English

Policy Context and Legal Framework

EU Action Programme for reducing administrative
burdens

This Action Programme sets out how the Commission proposes that information obligations should be identified, measured and reduced. The programme will measure administrative costs, take a judgment on which of these costs constitute unnecessary burdens and make proposals to remove them accordingly.
The Action Programme aims at delivering continuous, concrete improvements for businesses throughout the exercise. The Commission will not wait for the completion of this multi-annual measurement before showing results. Therefore, the Action Programme is accompanied by the first package of concrete reduction measures for immediate action.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

IT infrastructures and products

Overall Implementation approach

Public administration

Technology choice

Mainly (or only) open standards

Funding source

Public funding EU

Project size

Implementation: Not applicable/not available

Implementation and Management Approach

Our goal is to bridge the worlds of theory and practice. E-government is a field in which practitioners and theorists need to address one another and share their respective insights. It is important to have clear conceptual frameworks for the analysis of e-government. It also is crucial that these frameworks rest on empirical analysis that actually shows what is happening and what problems need to be addressed.

We look at two cases in the European Union (EU) and the United States of America (USA) from the point of view of how are their I&R being improved by going online, focusing on how do they share their I&R information with their citizens through internet. Then we will find out whether computational linguistic resources strengthen the improvement or in cost or in satisfaction. Information and Referral (I&R) services provideÂ an important social function describing a unique process of assessment and information-giving that enables people to make informed choices regarding their particular needs and the services that might be helpful to them.

I&R specialists, who are typically public servants, combine skillful questioning and careful listening with sensitivity, support, and guidance to help callers "sort out" their situations and make reasoned and informed decisions. They will identify the agencies/services that are best able to meet the caller's needs and explain the potential outcomes of pursuing one option over another. It is a process that gives individuals a sense of control over their situation. Â After talking with an I&R specialist, individuals feel much better equipped to make what are often important life decisions.

Many I&R agencies collect data regarding the number and nature of the enquiries they receive, and the information that is used, as an aid to improving the service by identifying gaps in the information available. I&R staff record statistics frequently and forward the pertinent information to the appropriate agencies we take advantage of this practice in this study.

There are thousands of I&R programs in operation across Canada, the United States, and Europe. Â In the USA many of these are comprehensive, community-based programs. Others are specialized programs catering to the needs of particular social groups, such as seniors, people with disabilities, children and youth, etc. Â I&R service providers include non-profit agencies, United Ways, libraries, hospitals, and employee assistance programs.

The most widely accepted definition of I&R is: the active process of linking a person with a need or problem with a service which will meet the need or solve the problem

For example, this type of service would provide detailed information, including the contact information, mailing address, and telephone number for organizations that are able to provide childhood immunizations. There are three basic requirements for an I&R service: creation of a resource file (which we are going to refer as the database, or the I&R database); distribution of the information; and updating of the file. I&R services were originally created to serve the disadvantaged members of underserved areas, but few have actually served this type of population exclusively.

The majority of US and EU administrations are planning to go entirely on-line in the coming years. In such a service environment, on-line I&R services will become indispensable. Â Despite many current citizens being considered digitally illiterate, their collective knowledge and that of society as a whole is very much greater than what Â civil servants generally give credit for, and can be utilized in such a way as to answer many of the difficult questions directly (Howe, 2008). Â The revolution in service provision that we foresee is based on this, and is mediated by giving tools to citizens in terms of direct access to the I&R information, and letting them improve it.

Furthermore, the new trends of e-government suggest public services going online, referring e-government as the "provision of governmental services by electronic means, usually over the Internet". Garson assumes that e-government is a political curiosity that must be explored discursively with reference to big ideas about power, resources, control and bargaining. And this is our point: let the information in the administration stored in its I&R databases be shared with the citizens, who, as Howe claims, as a sort of insiders will contribute with their own experience, with information that will be highly valuable for other citizens, the ones who deserve such a service from their administration. And the benefits of sharing are immense, though the administration might feel some loss of control. For Garson it is clear that e-government will continue to evolve and embrace the crowd sourcing way of dealing with public information, and this is our point of view. Â Providing I&R services online is aimed at reducing the services' cost, while at the same time expanding their capabilities and effectiveness, as well as citizens satisfaction. Â These changes are discussed here.

Technology solution

A popular way of sharing inquiry-based, I&R information on the Internet involves listing FAQs and their answers on web pages or text documents. FAQ lists remain the most common way of providing answers to common questions online. Many internet-based organizations and corporations will first direct clients and citizens to a publicly available FAQ document before submitting questions to support personnel. This limits the number of redundant questions and reduces the resources spent on support personnel.

A FAQ document has several drawbacks in comparison to an interactive Question and Answer (QA) system. If the FAQ is too small, the questions are unlikely to cover sufficient breadth of the topic. A small size is positive in that it enables readers to quickly determine if their questions are covered. A large FAQ set, on the other hand, can be intimidating to read and is not always guaranteed to provide the correct answer. Sometimes, larger FAQ sets will be covered in several documents, each dealing with a more specific area or topic. This can provide some structural advantages, but makes it harder to search for specific keywords relating to a question, as the user may not be familiar with the hierarchy used to organize the FAQs. Another problem with a static FAQ set is that there is no straightforward way for an I&R specialist to determine the types of questions citizens are actually asking. This can be solved by providing some sort of feedback, such as email. However, the citizen typically looks for an immediate answer for their question and will search elsewhere before submitting any feedback. If feedback were to be provided, an administrator could theoretically refine the FAQs based on empirical knowledge as to the types of questions being asked most frequently.

One of the greatest drawbacks with static FAQ sets is that users are not given the option to ask free-form questions; rather, they are forced to re-phrase the question in such a way that it matches the information available. Since citizens can be considered a type of insider, they may best understand and answer the questions of other citizens, then we expect to utilize citizens to answer each other. If storing the questions and answers, will lead to complete FAQ sets that contain answers to virtually any question. A system that uses FAQ is combined with QA (question - answer) resources to conform a question answering machine shown in Fig. 5.

It allows people inside the organization to search for information; then, it allows citizens to participate in the information exchange process, by providing with any information that helps citizens with their day to day problems and enables them to fully participate as members of their democratic community. It is information pertaining to the availability of local services such as health care, financial assistance, housing, transportation, education and childcare services; as well as information on recreation programs, clubs, community events, and information about all levels of government. This is what is called community information (Pettigrew, 1996).

The CommunityAnswers Â of Connecticut also provides community information, though it does not have any self organized capability, so can be considered a directed community. We suggest that those communities which provide self-organizing capability to provide assistance to other members of the city/town, such as iSAC in Terrassa are much better in allowing citizens to freely interact. The question then becomes: how to empower citizens so that they generate the questions and answers that fill the FAQ?

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

The transformative potential of new collaborative technologies can be used by administrations to fundamentally reinvent themselves in order to adapt to a new era of openness and networking
in terms of ideas, information and people. The resulting organizational forms and strategies bear little resemblance to the traditional models that have dominated much of the past century. We have seen two cases of significant cost reduction accompanied by an increase in the volume of answered questions by sharing the I&R databases (as a sort of back office) with citizens, who have direct access to the information and can even contribute with further information.

The difference between the two on-line I&R systems discussed in this paper lies in the fact that the I&R service of Terrassa has linguistic capabilities built into its search engine .since the on-line service deals with over 80% of the most frequently asked questions (i.e., those regarding the directory and agenda), the questions tend to be
simple. They can therefore be expressed in terms of simple keywords and answered using search engines such as Google. However, citizens appreciate the natural language interface as being friendlier and providing a higher degree of satisfaction than simple, keyword-based
interfaces. Unfortunately, it has not so far been possible to identify or measure an identifiable cost reduction resulting from this capability.

It should be noted that an I&R service has to have its information base updated very regularly when answering questions on-line, otherwise citizens would not use such a service. This creates a new problem in determining how the I&R database should be updated without increasing backup costs or requiring additional use of the I&R staff. This problem is key, but challenging and costly as well. The staff could work on this task full-time but there would still be plenty of missing, incorrect, or obsolete information. One possibility is to take advantage of the knowledge of
citizens or volunteers. Then, we have determined how best to assist in the creation of FAQ lists through the use of citizens, creating tools that allow them to input information in a collaborative but managed way.

Both iSAC and Community Answers provide models where the community and officials work together effectively to provide timely and accurate answers that meet the citizen - enquirer's needs. Considerable human intellectual input is however still required for this to function effectively and provide an accurate and authoritative set of answers to the complete range of potential queries .This level of service is inevitably expensive to provide, and it is necessary to explore further opportunities that can provide means of reducing this burden without compromising the level of service. This can best be done by automating some of the activities required using various artificial intelligence methods. For example, within the field of FAQ great effort has been made to develop information retrieval techniques. Modern Citizen Information Systems need to fulfil a large number of criteria. Consequently, the development of these systems is a non-trivial process. In order to improve the citizen's experience, these systems often need to personalize the information based on the current user's needs and personal context (e.g., number of family members or their current employment state, their interests in dog's owner's communities/ hobbies, etc).

The technologies discussed in this chapter can be used effectively to improve the quality of
Citizens Attention Services .This can be done by understanding citizens' demands through their natural language; it is based on the semantics of the communication process as a whole, and on structuring and semantic tagging of content to improve and simplify the retrieval process. Such systems need to take a citizen-centred approach to provide integrated views of information over
heterogeneous data sources. Since these data sources are usually autonomous (i.e. maintained by different local, regional and national public administrations) and distributed, frequently overlapping and changing, citizen attention services have to work hard to extract useful knowledge; this is likely to prove to be a very challenging technology transfer issue.

Finally, in addition to blogs and wikis, there are other emerging trends which may also be important to I&R services. Such trends include service-oriented architecture, mash-ups, personalized web services, RSS, Twitter, and mobile government. We need to ask how these technologies can be leveraged in I&R services. We do not know yet, though from our point of view one thing is for sure: sharing the I&R information with the citizens empowers the I&R service, regardless of how this is achieved.

Track record of sharing

An extended version of this case will appear in 2010 in Josep LluÃs de la Rosa, MercÃ¨Rovira, Martin Beer, and Miquel Montaner publication, Reducing Administrative Burden by Online Information and Referral Services, Citizens and E-Government: Evaluating Policy and Management.

Lessons learnt

The transformative potential of new collaborative technologies can be used by administrations to fundamentally reinvent themselves in order to adapt to a new era of openness and networking in terms of ideas, information and people. The resulting organizational forms and strategies bear little resemblance to the traditional models that have dominated much of the past century. We have seen two cases of significant cost reduction accompanied by an increase in the volume of answered questions by sharing the I&R databases (as a sort of back office) with citizens, who have direct access to the information and can even contribute with further information

The difference between the two on-line I&R systems discussed in this paper lies in the fact that the I&R service of Terrassa has linguistic capabilities built into its search engine.Since the on-line service deals with over 80% of the most frequently asked questions (i.e., those regarding the directory and agenda), the questions tend to be simple. They can therefore be expressed in terms of simple keywords and answered using search engines such as Google. However, citizens appreciate the natural language interface as being friendlier and providing a higher degree of satisfaction than simple, keyword-based interfaces. Unfortunately, it has not so far been possible to identify or measure an identifiable cost reduction resulting from this capability.

It should be noted that an I&R service has to have its information base updated very regularly when answering questions on-line, otherwise citizens would not use such a service. This creates a new problem in determining how the I&R database should be updated without increasing backup costs or requiring additional use of the I&R staff. This problem is key, but challenging and costly as well. The staff could work on this task full-time but there would still be plenty of missing, incorrect, or obsolete information. One possibility is to take advantage of the knowledge of citizens or volunteers. Then, we have determined how best to assist in the creation of FAQ lists through the use of citizens,
creating tools that allow them to input information in a collaborative but managed way.

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practice Online Information and Referral Services to Reduce Phone Calls